Hate speech rapper ‘must be treated like Lucy Connolly’.
Police told not arresting Bob Vylan frontman over ‘death to the IDF’ chants would be ‘clear example of two-tier justice’
Natasha Leake. Will Bolton Crime correspondent
29 June 2025 9:06pm BST
Police have been warned that failing to arrest a rapper over “appalling hate speech” at Glastonbury Festival would be a “clear example of two-tier justice”.
Bobby Vylan, whose real name is Pascal Robinson-Foster, repeatedly chanted “death, death to the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces]” in a performance that was broadcast live by the BBC.
The incident has drawn comparisons with the case of Lucy Connolly, who was jailed for 31 months last year for inciting racial hatred after publishing a racist social media post.
Robinson-Foster, the frontman of rap duo Bob Vylan, may have broken the law by using “threatening and abusive words that were likely to stir up racial hatred”.
Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said: “It seems very clear that this man was directly inciting violence. He should receive the same treatment under the law as others, such as Lucy Connolly.
“He should be arrested and prosecuted immediately. A failure to do so would be a clear example of two-tier justice under Sir Keir Starmer and his attorney general, Lord Hermer.”
Connolly posted a message last year amid public outrage in the wake of the Southport attack, in which Axel Rudakubana stabbed three young girls to death.
She wrote: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f------ hotels full of the b------- for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government politicians with them.
“I feel physically sick knowing what these [Southport] families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist, so be it.”
Credit: BBCRichard Tice, deputy leader of Reform UK, said that if police were going to be “consistent”, they should arrest and charge Robinson-Foster.Mr Tice said: “What he did was far worse than what Lucy Connolly did. His chanting was clearly anti-Semitic, it was clearly racist, it was an incitement to violence.”Sir Keir Starmer condemned Robinson-Foster’s “appalling hate speech” and warned that the BBC had questions to answer.The Prime Minister told The Telegraph that the corporation urgently “needed to explain how these scenes came to be broadcast”.The corporation is under growing scrutiny over why the performance was streamed unedited in the first place and why, when the offensive chants began, it failed to cut the feed or bleep any offensive language.The set was aired in full on BBC iPlayer on the stream showing the West Holts stage. Among the songs on the set list was Wicked & Bad, which includes the lyric, “Let’s go dig up Maggie’s grave and ask her where that milk went”, referring to Margaret Thatcher, the late Prime Minister.
The rapper chanted “free, free!” to which the crowd responded “Palestine!” He then repeatedly chanted: “Death, death to the IDF!”
On Sunday, the organisers of the festival also condemned the performance, with Emily Eavis posting a statement saying the chants “very much crossed a line” and that there is “no place... for anti-Semitism, hate speech or incitement to violence”.
On Sunday night, Avon and Somerset Police said it was reviewing footage of the set to determine whether any criminal offences were committed.
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